Fiction Quotes - Page 16

During the Japanese invasion, bombs had fallen from the sky and people could run for cover. Now, they exploded in the middle of the road, or in the fields while people were playing soccer.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

His wife had also studied art in her hometown, and she could paint, but depending on such work for her livelihood was just not possible. As far as appearances went, she was definitely a real beauty. When she was young, she looked a little like Gong Li, but now that she was middle-aged, she had put on weight and gradually taken on more of a bell-shaped look, resembling Li Siqin. But no matter what, a wife always looks better than her balding, broadbellied husband.

Chew Kok Chang

Nonfiction that smells like fiction is neither.

David Mitchell

Dear family,I am drafting a new laundry protocol for better and more considerate usage of the washing machine

Koh Choon Hwee

It was past midnight. From the carpark of the apartment blocks, a human figure with an unsteady gait emerged.

Lim Thean Soo

English. That was where I met him.

Andrew Koh

Brian organised for the body to be flown back.

Jolene Tan

The day the earth-moving machines arrived, it was as if aliens had invaded Earth. Overnight they appeared, diggers with huge scoops, plodding their slow and ancient ways across the landscape. By the next week they had multiplied and evolved into diverse forms—cranes with long arms, bulldozers and levellers, an assortment of lorries. All day they worked towards some unseen design, creating and removing debris, their latticework of tracks remaking and writing over the space. Untenanted and vulnerable, the attap huts offered no resistance.

Karen Kwek

To write is to reveal oneself.When I write something, fiction or non-fiction, I do not expect you to accept what I write, nor to agree with what I propose.I expect you to spend at least a tenth of a second to think about it - may be not about the characters, nor about the piece, but at least about the idea.

Sanhita Baruah

The exhausted earth groaned and quivered under the monotonous glare of the sun. Spirals of heat rose from the ground as if from molten lava. A panting lizard crawled painfully over the fevered rock in search of a shady crevice. Cattle and dogs cringed under the scanty shade of the trees and waited for the rain to deliver them from the heat and thirst. Instead the heat grew more intense and oppressive each day, singeing and stifling all living things with an invisible sheet of fire, which only the rain could put out.The drought had persisted for over a month.

S. Rajaratnam

My mind skipped to a sunlit Saturday morning a few months ago when Noah was supposed to be revising for his exams. I caught him looking out the window instead, distracted by a roving butterfly. “Noah, you’re supposed to be studying!” I scolded.He replied languidly, “I am! I’m studying what’s out there.

Monica Lim

How you spend your time when you are not working or studying says everything about who you are and what is motivating your life.

Jennifer Elisabeth

You battled monsters. You sweat and cried your way to this one prolific moment where you finally realize that those dark days and sleepless nights were pre-requisites to your becoming.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I never want a girl to lose all hope that her life can’t completely turn around, even if she feels that she is at the edge, standing on one foot, and ready to say goodbye.

Jennifer Elisabeth

We live in a world where there is such a clear definition of what a girl should be that it takes almost no effort at all to completely hate ourselves.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Remember, nothing happens before it’s supposed to, so trust that, as you are striving for authenticity and personal excellence, the recognition of your life’s purpose is nearing closer.

Jennifer Elisabeth

I think it all basically breaks down to something like this: You have to look and feel great first. If you eat well, exercise and get enough sleep, you will have ample energy and the proper self-confidence to create and produce beyond your wildest dreams! Looking great and radiating positive energy, while presenting your highest quality work, is what will always make you the most valuable and only logical choice in whatever it is that you reach for.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Although many things may still need to happen before you identify what your exact work will be, I know that every single person whom you’re meeting and every experience that you’re having is necessary to you discovering your purpose. They are points on a map leading you to the moment where a match will finally be lit and you will be able to see through the darkness.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Recognize that you have been chosen to be alive, right now, at this exact moment in time and know that none of that is random. There is something about you, your past or your future that is required at this exact moment in history. We need to know who you are and what you have been through.

Jennifer Elisabeth

Peace is one thing, revolution is another. You were either impatient or highly optimistic to think one would lead to the other. – Panchali Draupadi.

Krishna Udayasankar

Men like you and I make myths, we weave stories to sanctify the life that has been given to us. But not Govinda. Men like him don’t make myths; they make destiny. – Kshatta Vidur

Krishna Udayasankar

Without love, we would not comprehend compassion.- Govinda Shauri

Krishna Udayasankar

A new age dawns, Uttara. The Wheel of Time has turned. Not too long from now – hopefully in our lifetime – Aryavarta will be a janapada, a realm ruled by its people, the largest such in the world!– Abhimanyu Karshni

Krishna Udayasankar

Sisyphus, I. I cling to my rock, you don’t have to chain me. Stand back! I roll it up—up, up. And … down we go. I knew that would happen. See, I’m on my feet again. See, I’m starting to roll it up again. Don’t try to talk me out of it. Nothing, nothing could tear me away from this rock.

Susan Sontag

Noble though it may be, our way of life is nothing but servitude. It does not take long for servitude to turn to subjugation.– Shikandin Draupada

Krishna Udayasankar

That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking, what's your vice and what brand of trouble does it lead to?

Neal Stephenson

Capital dictates the fate of humanity.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer

What was justice, after all, but a particular outcome?

Suzanne Rindell

That's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while, but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your day.

Catherine Lacey

Perhaps she moves too slowly now, or the world moves too fast for her. She enters the lift, a giant wheel turns and steel cables lower the mechanized box. The lift drops down a black shaft, which exists at the heart of each HDB block. The country may be described, not as a place covered with blocks of public housing, but a topography where black vertical shafts, some forty storeys tall, rise out of the ground like trees.

Justin Ker

Did you ever think much about jobs? I mean, some of the jobs people land in? You see a guy giving haircuts to dogs, or maybe going along the curb with a shovel, scooping up horse manure. And you think, now why is the silly bastard doing that? He looks fairly bright, about as bright as anyone else. Why the hell does he do that for living?You kind grin and look down your nose at him. You think he’s nuts, know what I mean, or he doesn’t have any ambition. And then you take a good look at yourself, and you stop wondering about the other guy…You’ve got all your hands and feet. Your health is okay, and you make a nice appearance, and ambition-man! You’ve got it. You’re young, I guess: you’d call thirty young, and you’re strong. You don’t have much education, but you’ve got more than plenty of other people who go to the top. And yet with all that, with all you’ve had to do with this is as far you’ve got And something tellys you, you’re not going much farther if any.And there is nothing to be done about it now, of course, but you can’t stop hoping. You can’t stop wondering……Maybe you had too much ambition. Maybe that was the trouble. You couldn’t see yourself spending forty years moving from office boy to president. So you signed on with a circulation crew; you worked the magazines from one coast to another. And then you ran across a little brush deal-it sounded nice, anyway. And you worked that until you found something better, something that looked better. And you moved from that something to another something. Coffee-and-tea premiums, dinnerware, penny-a-day insurance, photo coupons, cemetery lots, hosiery, extract, and God knows what all. You begged for the charities, You bought the old gold. You went back to the magazines and the brushes and the coffee and tea. You made good money, a couple of hundred a week sometimes. But when you averaged it up, the good weeks with the bad, it wasn’t so good. Fifty or sixty a week, maybe seventy. More than you could make, probably, behind agas pump or a soda fountain. But you had to knock yourself out to do it, and you were standing stil. You were still there at the starting place. And you weren’t a kid any more.So you come to this town, and you see this ad. Man for outside sales and collections. Good deal for hard worker. And you think maybe this is it. This sounds like a right town. So you take the job, and you settle down in the town. And, of course, neither one of ‘em is right, they’re just like all the others. The job stinks. The town stinks. You stink. And there’s not a goddamned thing you can do about it. All you can do is go on like this other guys go on. The guy giving haircuts to dogs, and the guy sweeping up horse manute Hating it. Hating yourself.And hoping.

Jim Thompson

I mostly believe, deep in my bones, that life is very simply beyond description; regardless of what one makes of it, life always spills over the parameters of how anyone has chosen to define it.

Cyril Wong

I sat down in a booth, and the waitress shoved a menu in front of me. There wasn’t anything on it that sounded good, and anyway, one look at her and my stomach turned flipflops… Every goddamned restaurant I go to, it’s always the same way… They’ll have some old bag on the payroll — I figure they keep her locked up in the mop closet until they see me coming. And they’ll doll her up in the dirtiest goddamned apron they can find and smear that crappy red polish all over her fingernails, and everything about her is smeary and sloppy and smelly. And she’s the dame that always waits on me.

Jim Thompson

Darling, in this family we don't call anyone a novelist who has not written more books than Jane Austen.

Pansy Schneider-Horst

There used to be a rubbish heap under the great tree in Dhoby Ghaut with a sarabat stall parked next to it. It was a low, sprawling rubbish heap made up of the usual things—refuse from dustbins, paper, old tins and slippers and leaves from the tree above. Then one day, people forgot about it. They found a new dumping place and the old rubbish heap settled low on the ground. Time passed and its contents became warm and rich and fertile and people living in the area would take away potfuls of it to plant flowers in.Somehow, a rose cutting, slim as a cheeping chicken’s leg and almost brown, appeared on the rubbish heap one day.

Gregory Nalpon

In its basic form, nursing can be seen as a duty, but beyond the incessant operational activities that lay the foundation of our daily work, the profession is all about grace. Helping people is a noble calling. It is a privilege to serve my fellow human beings. Fifteen years has seen many ups and downs at the workplace, but I have enjoyed serving the many patients who come into my care, and have prayed for the souls of those who were on the brink of death.

Katherine Soh

There are myriad kisses in a relationship: desperate ones as involuntary as breathing, stolen ones on crowded trains, ceremonial ones at the front door, routine ones as dispassionate as licking an envelope. It takes two to kiss, but does it take two to hold the memory?

Stephanie Ye

Soon I find myself squatting on the floor. I am still striking my face; not with my fists this time, but with wide-open hands. I am slapping myself. The sounds I make when my palms meet my cheeks are like an unrelenting round of applause. I am clapping myself. Or clapping for myself. I start to giggle.All the voices are receding now. I am no longer filled with rage or disappointment. I clap and clap and simply cannot stop.

Cyril Wong

She remembered the way the damp, coarse sand had clumped to her legs and hands, and burrowed beneath her nails and into the folds of her clothes, and she had wondered why the British children in her storybooks were always excited about going to the beach—just as now she wondered why the light from the lighthouse seemed to be coming from the landward side of the expressway. “I thought a lighthouse is out at sea.

Yu-Mei Balasingamchow

No girl can forget the day she lost her virginity, or the circumstance that led to it

Augustine Sam

Stories are Life’s instruction manuals.

Robert Peate

Often, when I am able to check out a book, I read it a dozen times before returning it, desperate to remain lost in the magic of someone else's story.

Amy Engel

I am death; I am this blood, these ravaged lands, and this wanton destruction. – Panchali Draupadi

Krishna Udayasankar

Fiction is meant to illuminate, to explode, to refresh.

John Cheever

… the greatest mystery, the greatest wonder of creation is that we are capable of both relentless reason and boundless love ... It is not about what we are, but what we can become.– Govinda Shauri

Krishna Udayasankar

Cynicism can blind one to subtler virtues

David Mitchell

Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.

Todd M. Brenneman

The more we prepare for war, the more we make it a reality. Yet, it would seem, to prepare for war may also be the best and possibly the only way to avoid it.’ – Govinda Shauri, The Aryavarta Chronicles - Kurukshetra

Krishna Udayasankar

A wise man does not step betwixt the beast and his meat

David Mitchell

The proposition that primitive dream imagery might reproduce, albeit imperfectly, the experience of one's ancestors, including their terrors, was rather too existentially charged for post-modern sensitivities, for which the meaningless hypothesis of memory de-junking was much more appealing. Even worse, the notion that one's own ideation, one's own monsters, or indeed oneself as a monster, might be transmitted forward to future generations threatened deeply assumptions about the privacy of the mind and an individual's discretionary power of inviolable concealment over unedifying thoughts.

Robert Edeson

She's dead. So is your fat pansy. You can be dead, too, if you want.

Richard Stark

...every harsh word spoken, every such act or even thought doesn’t just disappear - it hangs around somewhere in totality and some day it boomerangs to haunt us.

Veena Nagpal

For too long now divinity and destiny have legitimized what reason and compassion would not. An individual for a family, a family for the kingdom, a kingdom for an empire... And now – an empire for humanity.– Govinda Shauri

Krishna Udayasankar

No one person is the cause for or consequence of all that happens. I am just the tenth man, the threshold, the turn in the tide. I stand here on the shoulders of humanity, a mere instrument of Time.– Govinda Shauri

Krishna Udayasankar

Kill them. Kill them all. Remind the world what it means to be Arya. Remind the world what it is to walk with the gods. – Syoddhan Kauravya

Krishna Udayasankar

Kill them. Kill them all. Remind the world what it means to be Arya. Remind the world what it is to walk with the gods.– Syoddhan Kauravyaw

Krishna Udayasankar

We are at war. There will be scars. – Uttara Vairati

Krishna Udayasankar

The Wheel of Time spins: there is beginning and there is end. But why does the Wheel of Time spin? Is it some divine force that propels it? Or is that force humanity, people in search of change and a better way of life?– Asvattama Bharadvaja

Krishna Udayasankar

I have placed my faith in humanity, but faith in the universal becomes meaningless without faith in the individual. – Panchali Draupadi

Krishna Udayasankar

Merdeka!' the Malay man screamed.'Merdekaaaaaa!' the sea of people echoed.

Mohamed Latiff Mohamed

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Fiction Quotes - Page 16

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